Dutch citizens don’t want a memorial designed by Daniel Liebeskind

When I checked my blog stats this morning, as I do the first thing every morning, I was surprised to see that more people in the Netherlands, than in America, had visited my blog yesterday.

I knew that something, related to the Holocaust, must be going on in the Netherlands, so I began frantically searching. I found a news story here which tells about a new monument that has been proposed for Amsterdam; Daniel Libeskind will design this monument. Residents of Amsterdam are objecting to this proposed monument. “Not in my garden,” say residents.

The photo below is an example of the work of Daniel Libeskind, who favors ultra modern design. In my humble opinion, ultra modern design is not appropriate for a Holocaust Memorial.

Jewish Museum in Berlin designed by Daniel Liebeskind

According to the news article, “Libeskind’s design, somewhat reminiscent of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., includes walls displaying the names of 102,000 [Dutch] victims [of the Nazis].

The photo below shows a Holocaust monument in the same park where the new monument will be built, if the objections of nearby residents can be overcome.

Holocaust monument in Amsterdam designed by Dutch artist Jan Wolkers which reads “Never Again Auschwitz” in the Wertheim park in Amsterdam (Click to enlarge)

One of the objections to the new memorial is that it is too big. Compared to the Holocaust memorial in the heart of Berlin, (shown in the photo below) the proposed Amsterdam monument is miniscule.

5 acres of concrete blocks in the heart of Berlin

This quote is from another news article, which you can read in full here:

Although the Libeskind design has not yet been unveiled, the work will be called the “Holocaust Names Monument”– because it will feature the names of all 102,000 Dutch Jews, Roma and Sinti (an itinerant Romani people, originally from Central Europe) who perished in Hitler’s camps.

“In percentage terms, the Netherlands had the highest deportation rate in western Europe, but there is no monument to honour their memory as individuals,” said Jacques Grishaver, chairman of the Dutch Auschwitz Committee.

“Their names simply vanished into thin air, like the people. Now, for the first time, families will have a place to go and a name on a plaque to touch.”

Most of those deported from the Netherlands were routed through Westerbork, where enclosed trains left several times a week for the extermination camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Sobibór and Theresienstadt.

Between 1942 and 1945, more than 107,000 captives left Westerbork in 93 trains to Germany. Only 5,200 of them survived long enough to be liberated.

Note that the news article lumps Auschwitz-Birkeanu and Sobibór in with Bergen-Belsen, which was an exchange camp, and Theresienstadt, which was a camp for “prominent Jews.” No matter where the Jews in Amsterdam were sent, they would up in an extermination camp, and were never seen again. What could have happened to them? They were all exterminated, of course.

Like this:

Most Holocaust commemorative art and architecture is ham fisted and ugly. It’s a new secular religion and these mushrooming memorials are it’s sacred shrines and temples. Of course, because the Holocaust is really just about about depredations against Jews in WWII (gays, gypsies and everyone else incarcerated in a time of war are really just an afterthought to universalize it) the contracts to design these monuments to morbidity are usually handed out to Jewish architects who believe Modernism itself is a Jewish invention that is liberating the world from oppressive (Christian) Classicism. Their ancestoral allergy to pigs and right angles prevents them from appreciating the sublimnity of them.

Strange that you should mention “right angles.” Just after I put up my blog post this morning, I got an e-mail from a friend who told me about the Jews not using right angles in their memorials. I thought he was joking.

The thing in Berlin is really a monstrosity. Not only that, it is already showing its age (so to speak) — damage to enough of the blocks is so severe it’s estimated it will cost over 10m euros to fix (the memorial itself cost nearly 30m euros). There is worry that some of the blocks may be so badly damaged that they cannot be repaired. People who read German can go here: Stelen des Holocaust-Mahnmals nicht zu sanieren?